There is good news for subscribers to Paramount+ outside the USA and Canada as today Paramount Global announced a new deal with Prime Video for both services to stream Picard and Lower Decks.
Picard coming to Paramount+ internationally starting February 16
Paramount+ announced that both Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Lower Decks will be joining the service’s international streaming catalog in a new deal with Prime Video, which previously had the exclusive rights outside the USA and Canada. This means the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard will premiere on Paramount+ on February 16 in Latin America, the same day as the USA, and on February 17 in the UK, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The new season of Picard will be on Parmount+ in South Korea at a later date. Previous seasons of Picard will also be available on Paramount+ in English-speaking regions starting this February.
The new season of Star Trek: Picard will also stream on Prime Video outside of the US and Canada, and in Canada it can be seen on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave.
Lower Decks coming to Paramount+ international too
In addition, all seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks will be available later this year across all Paramount+ markets outside Canada. Lower Decks is currently available to stream on Paramount+ in Latin America. Lower Decks is also available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Japan, India, and more, and in Canada on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave. Additional international availability to be announced at a later date.
These moves bring the international instances of Paramount+ into line with the USA where the streaming service is home to every series and every episode of the full catalog of Star Trek television. This includes all seasons of the Paramount+ original series Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Prodigy, and the newest addition Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount+ is currently live in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and South Korea.
Find more news on streaming and home video at TrekMovie.com.
That can’t have been cheap.
Both shows are of more strategic value to Paramount than Amazon, so there was grounds for a deal, especially now that Paramount+ is offered as an add-on stacked subscription on Prime’s platform in many countries.
I doubt it. I would be surprised if either series has a big audience internationally. A friend of mine in Germany has mentioned a couple of times that DSC has been big there for several years now, and more recently, that SNW “is blowing up here.” He also shared that after a lot of excitement, fans there have generally soured on Picard, and he added that LDS hasn’t had much appeal to German Trek fans.
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Just great to see these shows getting more widespread distribution! And spreading the love of Lower Decks is always a big positive in my book! 😀
For us in Slovenia, we have TNG, Prodigy and SNW on Sky Showtime. Horrible app, by the way. At least the Android version. Not even available on my Samsung TV (while Netflix, Hbo Max and others are available)
Oh so it’s possible to air Picard and Lower Decks on another (yes their own) streaming platform, but it isn’t possible the other way around for Discovery and newer eps of Prodigy??
Fans in various areas (with ‘SkyShowtime’ instead of Paramount+) are STILL waiting for season 4 of Discovery and the 2nd half of season 1 of Prodigy. Sigh..
Different contracts in different regions have different stipulations, and they can’t always be renegotiated. Many of these deals are holdovers from before Paramount+ existed, some from before CBSAA.
Some are deals they made just to get distribution overseas when they didn’t have the bandwidth to expand in those territories.
This just supports Ian’s point above that Paramount is still living with old contracts, and renegotiating the deal with Amazon Prime May have been costly.
In that case, I suspect/speculate that this may have been possible as part of larger negotiations that Paramount Global is having with Amazon, as both a carrier and a major client for new content licenses.
Others may not be as easy to solve. Or, it could be that those announcements will be made shortly in another business news cycle.
Prodigy is a Nickelodeon product, and may have some constraints related to the overall Paramount-Comcast deal on Nickelodeon.
Discovery rollout outside North America has been complicated by the need to exit the deal with Netflix. Netflix would rather bury IP than let it go elsewhere, so that it’s been a bigger hassle to repatriate Discovery and rollout new content even though Netflix didn’t want to renew.
I don’t know, Picard has kind of become lackluster, and from what I hear LDS isn’t that big of a deal in Europe. Amazon was probably just fine to see them go for some modest $.
It’s like that famous John Candy line in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where he needs to hock his watch to get a hotel room: “Casio?” Lol
Yeah I was surprised that there was no more Prodigy on SkyShowtime. I must say that SkyShowtime is not really an interresting service. I got it for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and I also watched Halo, but besides that, it’s not really worth the money in my opinion.
Couldn’t care less about Discovery though, stopped watching after Season 3.
I’m still pissed they pulled the last season of Discover from Netflix days before its release and half a year before Paramount Plus was available in the UK and most the rest of the world.
Lower Decks has never streamed on Pime Video in Latin America other than as part of Paramount+ just like all other Trek series, except for Picard, which is included with Prime.
Darn, wish it would have come to P+ in Canada too. Would have saved me having to subscribe to Crave yet again, which is an overpriced and poorly implemented service.
Which is why we still have CTV Sci-fi channel on Bell Fibe.
That and TSN are what keep us paying for linear.
this really nails down the idea that paramount is fully in the trek biz… when they announced the showtime merger some questioned trek’s future but they keep embracing and owning trek as a product to sell and stream. started by buying discovery back from netflix and then they’ve been taking control and spreading the p+ service. i know to some international viewers it was annoying but hopefully this all works out. by sharing lower decks and picard with amazon it seems they’ve learned their lesson about pulling the rug from under the international fans.
This is a positive surprise.
I haven’t seen any local promotion for the season here, but given this step (which probably cost Paramount a nice sum as others have said) and their aggressive marketing in the US you could almost get the impression that Paramount hopes they have a winner in their hands.
lower decks is amazing… and picard is entering season 3…. you mean winner as in paramount plus? or trek in general. they’ve been building it pretty steadily since disco in 2017. cant believe we’re 6 years in and like 15 seasons of shows.
aaaaand STILL no 4K/HDR/Atmos on P+ in the UK. If it’s not sorted by the time my renewal comes up, I’ll cancel and catch up on Star Trek when 4K is available. All their rivals stream in 4K…seriously, what decade are Paramount living in?
Any justification for why it’s a day later in the UK and some other markets?
Once upon a time that really wouldn’t have mattered, but when reviews etc spread across the Internet so fast it’s irritating having to keep clear of the coverage.
Just guessing here, but due to the time zone difference, releasing it on the same date might mean it’s available internationally before the US. So they rather just release it the day after.
I can’t imagine that Trek gets so many views that they need to spread out the server load ;-)
I would imagine that Paramount+ are almost certainly renting cloud infrastructure to serve different regions so it’s very unlikely to be a load issue – users in the US wouldn’t be getting it from the European datacentres and vice versa.
The time makes sense, though if they really wanted to they could release it in the morning in the US and that would equate to afternoon/evening here. So the idea is probably to have it morning everywhere for the especially keen!!
Wow great news! It’s nice to see both shows getting as much distribution as possible and that Paramount is trying hard to get these shows on their platforms for fans as fast as possible. LDS is totally totally worth it! And I hope season 3 of Picard will be.
Just in time for Picard to start, nice! Star Trek is starting to feel great again lately so get it out there Paramount!
What about Ireland? Will Picard be available on Paramount+ here too?